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Progress of Place: Black on Earth Film Series - Program 2

Films in this program take up space/time travel, the necessary but super dangerous mission to locate a better Black future via "white" technologies and genres.

Afronauts (Frances Bodomo, 2014; 13m)
Inspired by true events, Afronauts tells an alternative history of the 1960s Space Race, as the Zambian space program prepares to blast 17-year-old Matha to the moon in its makeshift Bantu-7 Rocket.

Destination: Planet Negro (Kevin Willmott, 2013; 98m)
In this parody of classic sci-fi B-movies, a group of pre-war Black intellectuals explores colonizing Mars, but land instead in an equally alienating 21st century America.

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart is Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Her publications include the award-winning books Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005) and LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (co-editor, University of California Press, 2015). She is co-curator of Kino Lorber's box set Pioneers of African American Cinema. Her film work in Chicago includes directing the South Side Home Movie Project and serving as Curator of Black Cinema House, a neighborhood-based film exhibition venue run by Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation.

Art Gallery of Ontario

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